Oral history project seeks to record flood stories

Process of collecting interviews to take years, draw from around county

Cars located in the underground parking at the Frasier Meadows complex in Boulder were completely covered in mud and water in the September flood. People living there will be interviewed as part of the Boulder Library's Oral History Project examination of the memorable storm.
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CLIFF GRASSMICK
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Maria Rogers Oral History Program

To volunteer to be interviewed about your flood experiences, contact Program Manager Susan Becker at beckers@boulderlibrary.org. Becker said project organizers are currently making lists of possible contacts, and it may be some time before they get in touch.

To listen to or read transcripts of previous oral history interviews, including interviews related to the Fourmile Fire, go to oralhistory.boulderlibrary.org. You can also visit the Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, 1125 Pine St.

The Boulder Library's Maria Rogers Oral History Project is looking for Boulder and Boulder County residents willing to be interviewed about their experiences during the historic September floods.

Starting in 1976, volunteer interviewers with the oral history project have interviewed between 40 and 80 Boulder County residents a year. Early subjects were homesteaders who arrived in Boulder by covered wagon and who worked the mines and farms that drove the region's economy.

But the oral history project has also sought to collect stories from current events with historic significance.

"What may seem to be current events now may become history," said Susan Becker, program manager for the oral history project. "Oral history recordings are a way to create a primary source for history."

Becker said the flood project seeks to take a very broad view of the flood and collect interviews from people who were evacuated, who experienced damage to their homes and who worked as first responders, but also from people who repaired roads and open space trails and worked to assess the success and failure of flood mitigation efforts.

Radio station KGNU has offered to donate interviews done during the flood, and Boulder-based filmmaker Angie Burnham has also offered to donate the full-length interviews she conducts for a documentary about the flood, Becker said.

A previous documentary by Burnham, "Packed," about the objects people chose to save from their fire-threatened homes, contributed material to the oral history project's Fourmile collection.

"The interviews will probably go on for several years," Becker said. "Some people are still so busy they're not ready to talk. And there's a value in doing the interview a little later, when the person has time to develop some perspective."

However, interviewers hope to complete and post a "good number" of interviews by the one-year anniversary of the flood, Becker said.

"When you interview people soon after, you get a kind of detail that might be lost if you talk to people later, and if you talk to people a little further down the road, you get perspective that you don't get closer to the events," Becker said. "We want to get both."

Douglas Burger and Kay Cook, retired English professors from the University of Colorado who were rescued by zipline from a neighbor's cabin in Salina, contributed one of the first interviews to the project.

Cook, who is also an Episcopal priest, said that as teachers of literature, they both recognize the value of stories.

"Oral history is incredibly important," she said. "I know you can pull up all the news stories, and the news coverage was really good, but there is no substitute for people's stories."

When the flood waters rose in Salina, Burger and Cook first went to a neighbor's house that had a second story. From that vantage point, they saw a wall of water move through the canyon carrying boulders, cars and trees. It was "traumatic to watch," Cook said.

"We could not believe what we were seeing," she said.

From that house, rescuers evacuated Burger, Cook and the home's owner to a cabin further upstream. When four adults (and three dogs and a canary) later had to be evacuated from the cabin, they had to go by zipline, then hike up a steep slope.

At 76, Burger was the oldest person in the group. One person held the back of his shirt and two more held him by the elbows as he walked up the hill until he could reach a waiting ATV.

"I was never very much worried about it, other than what happened to our possessions," Burger said. "Our rescuers were so confident. We had complete faith in them."

Burger said the most painful loss was personal items like photographs, but he and Cook are back in Salina in a recently constructed house they are renting.

Telling his story to the oral history project reminded him not just of his losses but also of the strong community bonds there.

"I find telling the story relatively healing," he said. "It's useful to describe what we went through and realize the recovery that has happened in our town and with us and with our neighbors."

He hopes the oral history project will help future generations learn the flood's lessons.

"We need to keep records of what was destroyed in this flood," Burger said. "It's part of the process of being prepared for floods in the future."

Oral historians increasingly have sought to document current events, Becker said. The most prominent efforts in the last decade involved recording accounts of survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, Becker said.

The project seeks to document experiences across a wide geographic area, from mountain towns like Salina and Jamestown to plains cities like Longmont and Erie.

They also want to talk to people in hard-hit neighborhoods like University Hill, Newlands, Pinebrook, Chautauqua and Wagon Wheel Gap, to people in Frasier Meadows Home who helped evacuate elderly and disabled residents, to homeless people who were denied shelter and who weathered the storm outside, to evacuees from Lyons, to residents of Keewayden Meadows who dealt with epic sewer backups.

Project participants want to talk to utility workers, meteorologists, homeowners and renters, to residents of mobile home parks, to farmers, to university administrators and students and to rescuers.

Becker said anyone who is interested in telling their flood story can email her at beckers@boulderlibrary.org. It might be a few months or more before an interviewer gets in contact with a subject -- there are just 10 volunteer interviewers and the project's scope is still being settled -- but the project is very much interested in hearing from the community.

"This brings the voice of the community into the library collection," Becker said.

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